Knife crime rises as youth service budgets are slashed: this has to stop

As councils keep cutting the budgets that feed directly into youth services, knife crime numbers just keep getting higher and more young men and women keep getting killed. For GQ Hype, All City columnist Ciaran Thapar demands to know: when will it stop?

The first time I visited the Houses of Parliament as a youth worker was to lead a trip in August 2016 with five teenagers from Marcus Lipton community centre in Brixton, South London. We’d been invited there by our MP, Helen Hayes, who later that month visited us at the centre for a discussion with the boys about their relationship with local police.

As we entered the black gate to go through security, one guard stopped the boys and made them read the sign listing forbidden objects — drugs, weapons, explosives. He’d done the same to the people queuing in front of us, too. But something about the way he tilted the sign towards our group for a few seconds longer than necessary made me feel uncomfortable. As we went through the metal detectors, the boys laughed out loud about how pointless it would be to bring a knife into one of the safest buildings in the country.

On the tour, we were shown through airy corridors and into grand, oak-panelled rooms. We stood in the empty Commons chamber amongst the green chairs and gazed up at the golden lining engraved on the walls. One young man expressed to the tour guide that they wanted to work, “somewhere like here” and asked how much politicians earn. Another asked why money spent on the decoration can’t be spent on problems in wider society, like housing.

Afterwards, we caught cabs to Chelsea and took a seat in a dining room overlooking Sloane Square, surrounded by well-dressed adults. All of us ordered the £14 English breakfasts. The purpose of the meal was to expose the boys to fine-dining in a part of London they had identified as being too scared to visit because, “white people will look down on us”. But the table service was poor. The waiter kept forgetting we were there. “I can get better than this at Jimmy’s!” one of the boys exclaimed, referring to a cafe on Coldharbour Lane, in Loughborough Junction, round the corner from his block.

“If you’re a young person, and every day you wake up and you think you’re at the bottom of the pile, and you live in a society which is violent, and which tells you to get yours — not to worry about anyone else, but to just focus on yourself — it’s going to take a lot to get you to change your lifestyle,” announces Ira Campbell, the Managing Director of Marcus Lipton. Now, nearly three years later, it’s 7th May 2019, and I’m sat at a long table behind Ira, who is my good friend and mentor, on one side of a crammed Committee Room 16 in the Houses of Parliament.

We are attending an event hosted by the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Knife Crime, with support from the APPG on Youth Affairs. The event is themed around the intersection of these two collectives: exploring the relationship between the UK’s youth services and the rising crisis of serious violence across major cities. As well as a few politicians, youth sector leaders and frontline workers, tens of teenagers from all over the country are dotted around the room. They have all been encouraged to contribute their thoughts and recommendations to the discussion by Sarah Jones, the Labour MP for Croydon Central, who is chairing the meeting.

Ira is on a panel of speakers, which also includes Sephora Ochou, Parliamentary Ambassador for the British Youth Council, who, among other things, makes the case for having safe spaces for young people to spend time away from home and school environments. Leigh Middleton, CEO of the National Youth Agency, talks about the lack of properly trained youth workers, and the disproportionate focus on schools despite the fact young people spent 85% of their time outside of them.

Mervyn Kaye, CEO of Youth First, a uniquely independent youth service for the South East London borough of Lewisham, explains the value of a voluntary relationship that a young person can form with a trusted youth worker, and laments the fact that some youth workers he knows have opted to drive buses instead because the pay is better. Dr Michael Whelan, a Senior Lecturer in Childhood and Youth Studies at Coventry University, refers to research suggesting that young people’s experience of public space is increasingly defined by fear, and advocates for a detached, street-based model for engaging with hard-to-reach teenagers.

Between them, the speakers are responding to three questions. What do young people want from youth services? What does effective youth work look like? What role do youth services have? Ira is speaking last, answering the final question.

“This work has to be innovative” he says. Everyone in the room is hooked on his every word. “It’s not going to be for everyone, but it needs people who are prepared to do a 24/7 job; who are going to stick around for more than the two years it takes to really get to know someone; who will take a call in the middle of the night for a young person. And that means paying youth workers properly, making youth work feel like a high standard profession, getting rid of egos and professional snobbery. And it’s not just about getting ex-gang members in to do work. It’s also about having other ingredients to bake the cake; other people and professions who can expose young people to new things.”

As the UK’s serious violence epidemic has spiralled out of control over the last three years, there has been a ballooning, crystallising intuition that the decimation of youth service budgets is to blame. This makes perfect sense: as recent research found, for example, the number of youth centres in London has fallen from 234 to 130 since the 2011 riots.

It doesn’t take much intellectual genius to draw a link between this drastic reduction in available support for young people, who are most likely to get stabbed in the two hours after school hours finish, when youth clubs are at their busiest, and the rising amount of violent knife crime taking place. But until now, the data on the cuts nationwide been limited, and the assumed correlation between these cuts and the rise in violence has remained indirectly proven.

Coinciding with the day of the event, the APPG on Knife Crime, supported by charities Barnardo’s and Redthread, have released figures on youth service budgets using Freedom of Information requests, which around 70% of councils replied to. The data shows that the average council has cut real-terms spending on youth services by 40% over the past three years. There has been a 68% increase in knife offencesrecorded by police in England and Wales over a similar period (from 25,516 in the year ending March 2014 to 42,790 in the year ending September 2018).

Since 2013-14 there has been a 99% increase in knife crime offences for Thames Valley

Crucially, the top four worst hit local authority areas were City of Wolverhampton (youth services funding cut by 91%), City of Westminster (91%), Cambridgeshire County Council (88%), and Wokingham Borough Council (81%). And fittingly, police forces serving these precise areas have seen some of the highest knife crime increases. Since 2013/14 there has been an 87% increase in knife crime offences for West Midlands Police, a 47% rise in London, a 95% increase for Cambridgeshire Police, and a 99% increase for Thames Valley.

The findings have made some ripples in the media, but with the new royal baby born a day beforehand, as ever, it’s difficult to compete for mass attention. Following the session today, the APPG plans to investigate youth worker salaries, after growing anecdotal reports that pay in the sector is suffering and rendering effective, sustainable careers harder and harder to carve out.

Sat next to me is 17-year-old Jhemar Jonas, from Brixton, who I have mentored since he was 12. In November 2017, Jhemar’s older brother, Michael, was chased across Betts Park in Penge, South East London, and stabbed to death. Nobody has been convicted for his murder. Two months after it happened, in January 2018, I accompanied Jhemar to our first APPG meeting, which was focused on the link between social media and violence.

One of my other mentees, 19 year-old Demetri Addison, from Elephant & Castle, attended too (he and Jhemar were the only two teenagers in a room full of suited adult politicians and businesspeople). I first met Demetri in 2016, when I oversaw an educational mentoring intervention at his sixth-form. In his interview for a place on the programme, he told me he wanted to study at university to understand why boys in his community choose to carry knives. He now has an offer to study Sociology as an undergraduate at Goldsmiths University, starting in October.

Demetri is sat on the other side of Jhemar. This time, both of them made their own way from their South London homes to meet me inside the committee room. Jhemar even brought a friend from college on his own accord. The regularity of our group trips to the building has meant that they now have a deserved sense of entitlement whilst walking through security, asking for directions, navigating the labyrinthine stone hallways, and taking a seat in a position where they can raise their hands clearly to offer comments if they feel like doing so. Towards the end of the event, Jhemar asks to speak, and Sarah Jones MP addresses him by name.

“It’s all very well us talking about providing opportunities to young people but they’ve got to be the right opportunities, and they have to be accessible to the right young people,” he says, with conviction. “I know about things I can do to better myself because I’ve got people around to show me, and I do my research. But so many people don’t know where to look and don’t receive the help they need before it’s too late” he continues. “And another thing. I lost my brother to knife crime. He was killed in a park. So I agree with the idea that making public space safe has to be a priority. These rivalries are very, very real.”

Earlier this year, on Thursday 21st February 2019, I was supposed to visit Ira at Marcus Lipton and spend some time doing outreach with young men at the community centre for a critical thinking group I’d planned to launch in the spring. But I had a cold, and kept sneezing, so I decided to stay at home. Later that evening I received a call from Jhemar, who had just travelled home on the P5 bus, which weaves through Brixton in view of the centre. He told me I ought to contact Ira because the road was closed off by police tape.

It turned out that whilst the centre was especially busy with young people that evening, enjoying the freedom of their half-term holiday, a 17 year-old intruder managed to slip through the front door with a knife and stab 23 year-old Glendon Spence to death. Ira was there when it happened.

The tragedy has completely rocked the closed world of the local community in Loughborough Junction. Now, staff must start afresh to reopen and ensure that young people can feel protected under the building’s slanted roof, as they have done for several decades. If it wasn’t for Ira and his welcoming arm when I first turned up at the centre four years ago asking to volunteer, I wouldn’t be a youth worker, and I certainly wouldn’t be writing this article.

Marcus Lipton community centre is named after a former MP for Brixton. In the mid-1950s, Mr Lipton invited a 13 year-old constituent called John Major on a tour of Parliament. The boy grew up to be the Conservative party leader and British Prime Minister. He would later state that the tour is what first sparked his ambition to one day become a politician. The fundamentals of doing effective youth work, whether that is through mentoring, teaching practical life skills like how to respond calmly to being stop-and-searched or fix-up a bicycle, or facilitating life-changing trips to new environments, and how necessary the sector is in our constantly evolving society, haven’t ever changed.

It should not be that difficult to guide and inspire young people to lead fulfilling lives, no matter what background they are from, especially if they are not afforded the privilege of automatic financial and emotional stability in their family home. But by removing the spaces, specialists and funding needed to make this happen, the current government — I do not say this lightly — is killing off young urban British life as we know it, in an unnecessary ideological war. It has to end.